About Ryan McGinness

Equal parts Pop, Baroque, commercial, and street, Ryan McGinness’s psychedelic paintings merge slick biomorphic abstraction with surrealistic imagery. Trained as a graphic artist, McGinness transfers and subverts the images and techniques of commercial illustration—logos and symbols, silkscreening, hard edges, and vibrant colors—into his boldly graphic yet graceful works. “My paintings are composed of many units of meaning,” he says. “Individual drawings come together to create non-linear narrative mindscapes—random access memories.” McGinness has translated these same concerns across a range of mediums, creating sculptures, projections, and immersive installations of fluorescent light. His recent work Women: Blacklight Paintings & Sculptures (2012) exploded his body of nude figurative studies into an installation of glow-in-the-dark sculptures and exuberant, layered paintings. Of his predilection for neon, McGinness has said: “When I look inward, those are the colors I see.”

American, b. 1972, Virginia Beach, Virginia, based in New York, New York